Pigs could well be sapient too. It really depends on where you draw the line for “sapience.” If you mean “able to think” or even “self aware” then pigs almost certainly are sapient. If by sapient you mean “of or relating to the human species” then obviously they aren’t, but that latter definition has no bearing or point in this discussion. You bloodmouths (that’s your wording!) keep trying to find some line you can draw in the sand that makes the torture of non-humans acceptable, but every time that line is examined it turns out it doesn’t exist, or at best, it turns out to be such a fuzzy boundary that it consigns tonnes of humans to the same status that’s used to justify the treatment of the beings tortured and killed as treats for carnists.
i think we mostly care about people, and place humans, sometimes other animals (usually pets), childrens’ toys, and occasionally some machines or fictional characters into the “person” or “not person” buckets depending on our personal attachment and a bunch of arbitrary social norms.
If the pig isn’t a person, then it doesn’t matter what you do with the lever and people with that conclusion might pull the lever because the beans will make less of a mess, because the pig will create a more expensive accident, or they might have an empathy response that finds gratuitous suffering distasteful and pull the lever but go home and eat some venison.
Anyone who thinks the pig is a person is puling the lever unless the pig wronged them in some way personally.
I have deliberately not defined any of these terms because they are not rigorously defined by the social norms.
A less circle-jerking version of this bait post might be a pig versus terry schaivo’s corpse being kept “alive” by a heap of medical devices.
i think we mostly care about people, and place humans, sometimes other animals (usually pets), childrens’ toys, and occasionally some machines or fictional characters into the “person” or “not person” buckets depending on our personal attachment and a bunch of arbitrary social norms.
You think “we” do that? I don’t. I make it a point to carefully consider who should be given my empathy or condemnation based on material reality.
I’m not entirely sure what your point is to be honest. Yeah, unfortunately there are plenty of people who base their sphere of empathy not on a materialist examination of the world but on societal norms, and that’s the problem here (along many of the problems we rightly rail about as leftists). It’s what I mean when I talk about arbitrary lines differentiating the human animal from all others to justify the way some humans treat all others.
Are you equating pets to children’s toys? Hopefully you’re just pointing out how ridiculous that is? One of those things is a lifeform that has the capacity to experience their existence, the other is an inanimate object no different than a rock. These things are not comparable. Same thing with a machine. There is a material difference between an animal (homo sapien or pig) and a machine, just as there is between a human and an LLM. That some people might be so ignorant as to think an LLM and a human being deserve equal consideration and empathy is not a valid or coherant argument that sentient beings who happen not to be human are ok to torture and kill.
You can call it person-hood if you like, but that just obsfucates things because people tend to think of “person” as “human” and what we’re talking about here is the capacity to suffer and to experience, which is not exclusive to humanity. It’s just another example of using the bias that’s already built in to language as a means to prove a point through circular reasoning, something we should be familiar with and wary of as leftists.
A less circle-jerking version of this bait post might be a pig versus terry schaivo’s corpse being kept “alive” by a heap of medical devices.
How is that less circle-jerking? Why is this version “circle-jerking” at all? The difference in either version is a lever to choose between something that can experience and suffer and something that can’t.
Are you equating pets to children’s toys? Hopefully you’re just pointing out how ridiculous that is? One of those things is a lifeform that has the capacity to experience their existence, the other is an inanimate object no different than a rock. These things are not comparable. Same thing with a machine. There is a material difference between an animal (homo sapien or pig) and a machine, just as there is between a human and an LLM. That some people might be so ignorant as to think an LLM and a human being deserve equal consideration and empathy is not a valid or coherant argument that sentient beings who happen not to be human are ok to torture and kill.
i have seen people become very attached to a stuffed toy or a motorcycle or the characters on a TV show etc. these things are personified and elevated to the level of a human person. In that way they are actually very similar to how these people feel about their pet versus how they feel about some mixture of several cows they eat in a burger.
i’m not making excuses for the ingroup and the outgroup framework not being formed using marxist philosophy, just describing how non-vegans seem to operate without running into cognitive dissonance.
I agree, non-vegans (or certainly at least anti-vegans, even in this thread) can only operate by avoiding facing their cognitive dissonance through child-like abstractions. But a puerile affection for a stuffed animal has zilch to do with the material basis behind veganism and the very real suffering on an unimaginable scale that carnists subject sentient life to for profit and treats.
i don’t think people are dodging any dissonance because the framework doesn’t have any contradictions to resolve. The outgroup doesn’t matter. Once you start thinking the outgroup matters that’s when contradictions appear and people who make that leap cram their dissonance into a little corner and become pescatarian or some other half-measure, or eliminated it by becoming vegans.
everybody else just keeps on eating the food they’re used to because the food animals aren’t people and any consideration for the suffering of a pig in new jersey that can’t turn around in its stall is as much of a treat for the virtue-signaler as the bacon that comes from it.
Are you saying carnists don’t experience cognitive dissonance about eating dead animals? Because they do. Why would carnists get so irrationally angry at the mere existence of vegans if they didn’t? “Oh, you’re vegan? Well I’m going to eat an extra burger today, just to spite you.” Carnists say that shit so often it’s a damn meme, and you think they’re not facing cognitive dissonance. Why do carnists hate it when you call their “food” what it is: corpses? They know that’s what they eat, but they hate being reminded of that fact. That’s like, textbook cognitive dissonance right there.
That’s like, textbook cognitive dissonance right there.
‘Cognitive dissonance’ is about as real a thing as Oedipus complexes. It was proposed by some authors in the 50’s to explain why people felt uncomfortable when they were put on the spot and had their views challenged as part of some study. There’s no logic short circuit in the brain that trips everytime some law of formal logic gets violated.
There is something in a carnist’s brain that trips and causes them to lash out at vegans, that is undeniable. Maybe we shouldn’t call it “cognitive dissonance”, but if not, we need a new term for it, because it’s real, I’ve experienced it.
any consideration for the suffering of a pig in new jersey that can’t turn around in its stall is as much of a treat for the virtue-signaler as the bacon that comes from it.
Lmao take of the year DAE caring about suffering is the same as benefiting from it carnists try not to paint yourselves into rhetorical corners challenge
Pigs could well be sapient too. It really depends on where you draw the line for “sapience.” If you mean “able to think” or even “self aware” then pigs almost certainly are sapient. If by sapient you mean “of or relating to the human species” then obviously they aren’t, but that latter definition has no bearing or point in this discussion. You bloodmouths (that’s your wording!) keep trying to find some line you can draw in the sand that makes the torture of non-humans acceptable, but every time that line is examined it turns out it doesn’t exist, or at best, it turns out to be such a fuzzy boundary that it consigns tonnes of humans to the same status that’s used to justify the treatment of the beings tortured and killed as treats for carnists.
i think we mostly care about people, and place humans, sometimes other animals (usually pets), childrens’ toys, and occasionally some machines or fictional characters into the “person” or “not person” buckets depending on our personal attachment and a bunch of arbitrary social norms.
If the pig isn’t a person, then it doesn’t matter what you do with the lever and people with that conclusion might pull the lever because the beans will make less of a mess, because the pig will create a more expensive accident, or they might have an empathy response that finds gratuitous suffering distasteful and pull the lever but go home and eat some venison.
Anyone who thinks the pig is a person is puling the lever unless the pig wronged them in some way personally.
I have deliberately not defined any of these terms because they are not rigorously defined by the social norms.
A less circle-jerking version of this bait post might be a pig versus terry schaivo’s corpse being kept “alive” by a heap of medical devices.
You think “we” do that? I don’t. I make it a point to carefully consider who should be given my empathy or condemnation based on material reality.
I’m not entirely sure what your point is to be honest. Yeah, unfortunately there are plenty of people who base their sphere of empathy not on a materialist examination of the world but on societal norms, and that’s the problem here (along many of the problems we rightly rail about as leftists). It’s what I mean when I talk about arbitrary lines differentiating the human animal from all others to justify the way some humans treat all others.
Are you equating pets to children’s toys?
Hopefully you’re just pointing out how ridiculous that is? One of those things is a lifeform that has the capacity to experience their existence, the other is an inanimate object no different than a rock. These things are not comparable. Same thing with a machine. There is a material difference between an animal (homo sapien or pig) and a machine, just as there is between a human and an LLM. That some people might be so ignorant as to think an LLM and a human being deserve equal consideration and empathy is not a valid or coherant argument that sentient beings who happen not to be human are ok to torture and kill.
You can call it person-hood if you like, but that just obsfucates things because people tend to think of “person” as “human” and what we’re talking about here is the capacity to suffer and to experience, which is not exclusive to humanity. It’s just another example of using the bias that’s already built in to language as a means to prove a point through circular reasoning, something we should be familiar with and wary of as leftists.
How is that less circle-jerking? Why is this version “circle-jerking” at all? The difference in either version is a lever to choose between something that can experience and suffer and something that can’t.
i have seen people become very attached to a stuffed toy or a motorcycle or the characters on a TV show etc. these things are personified and elevated to the level of a human person. In that way they are actually very similar to how these people feel about their pet versus how they feel about some mixture of several cows they eat in a burger.
i’m not making excuses for the ingroup and the outgroup framework not being formed using marxist philosophy, just describing how non-vegans seem to operate without running into cognitive dissonance.
I agree, non-vegans (or certainly at least anti-vegans, even in this thread) can only operate by avoiding facing their cognitive dissonance through child-like abstractions. But a puerile affection for a stuffed animal has zilch to do with the material basis behind veganism and the very real suffering on an unimaginable scale that carnists subject sentient life to for profit and treats.
i don’t think people are dodging any dissonance because the framework doesn’t have any contradictions to resolve. The outgroup doesn’t matter. Once you start thinking the outgroup matters that’s when contradictions appear and people who make that leap cram their dissonance into a little corner and become pescatarian or some other half-measure, or eliminated it by becoming vegans.
everybody else just keeps on eating the food they’re used to because the food animals aren’t people and any consideration for the suffering of a pig in new jersey that can’t turn around in its stall is as much of a treat for the virtue-signaler as the bacon that comes from it.
Are you saying carnists don’t experience cognitive dissonance about eating dead animals? Because they do. Why would carnists get so irrationally angry at the mere existence of vegans if they didn’t? “Oh, you’re vegan? Well I’m going to eat an extra burger today, just to spite you.” Carnists say that shit so often it’s a damn meme, and you think they’re not facing cognitive dissonance. Why do carnists hate it when you call their “food” what it is: corpses? They know that’s what they eat, but they hate being reminded of that fact. That’s like, textbook cognitive dissonance right there.
‘Cognitive dissonance’ is about as real a thing as Oedipus complexes. It was proposed by some authors in the 50’s to explain why people felt uncomfortable when they were put on the spot and had their views challenged as part of some study. There’s no logic short circuit in the brain that trips everytime some law of formal logic gets violated.
There is something in a carnist’s brain that trips and causes them to lash out at vegans, that is undeniable. Maybe we shouldn’t call it “cognitive dissonance”, but if not, we need a new term for it, because it’s real, I’ve experienced it.
Lmao take of the year
DAE caring about suffering is the same as benefiting from it carnists try not to paint yourselves into rhetorical corners challenge
Human nature pessimism on hexbear dot net so that I don’t have to eat the beans